Chapter 46: Rising tide

Taking a break from testing models, I stretch out my crown and catch every ray of sunlight, hunting for that last level of Photosynthesis. From the corner of my eye, I watch Sairal fiddle with some metal box with disgust on his face.

Observing him for several more minutes, growing increasingly frustrated, I ask what’s going on.

“The magic is wrong,” he growls.

“The magic is wrong?” I echo.

He closes the latch on the box, shakes it and reads something off the panel, “Or this device has gone defect,” the dryad throws it into his spatial pocket and sighs, “I need to test some things outside the walls and hunt for my last level. Tell Cobalt that she has full reign over all the mushroom guardians.”

After stretching out like a cat, he grabs his bow that hangs from a branch and his quiver that was lying on the moss, “Will you two be okay while I’m gone?”

I give him a shrug, “Probably, Cobalt has been taking down every monster she can get her hands on with her posse.”

He nods and speeds towards the walls. Without any effort, he hops over them and vanishes into the forest. I follow in his wake and climb on top of the shoddy walls that creak under my weight, searching around for Cobalt. Far to the left, mist swirls around in a cyclone, with her sitting at the centre, turning the few monsters that came too close to the walls into frosty chunks of meat. I give her the message and return to my own space again.

I rub my hands together as I lay my eyes on my latest model. It hasn’t been more than a week since I began making these things, and yet I feel like I’m close to something that is far more durable than what I started with.

The roots haven’t changed much through the different models, instead, it is the wall that changed. Where it used to be a twisted mess of roots that didn’t align in any pattern, it’s now slowly coming together. The core of the wall consists of the thickest, most durable bindweed vines I can conjure, wrapped around each other to distribute force.

When Cobalt helped me test its strength, it didn’t just topple over with a few blows, though, when she was done the vines were a gorey paste and the roots beneath the ground had snapped in various places, affecting the stability. But brute force isn’t what I’m worried about. No, it’s those stupid insects gnawing through it with time.

I came up with layering thinner vines over the thicker ones, hoping that they’ll have more trouble with them. Perhaps, with a bit of luck, the barbs on their mandibles might get stuck when trying to snap the smaller bindweed strands.

I check the model several times, fixing the tiny mistakes I made when weaving the layers onto the wall. As anyone might imagine threading dozens of vines together at once with only your mind and a skill to assist, isn’t easy to do.

Opening a system window that shows me the information of all my skills, I focus on two skills in particular.

Bindweed Manipulation (R) lvl 21/25: Allows the being to manipulate bindweed at the expenditure of Stamina. Expenditure scales with range.

Bindweed Conjuration (R) lvl 19/20: Allows the being to conjure bindweed at the expenditure of stamina. Expenditure scales with range.

Unlike with my other skills that reached the cap, the system didn’t let me upgrade it and only gave me the option to increase the cap by five levels at the expenditure of a skill point. Sairal said that the higher the rarity a skill is, the more levels need to be gained for upgrades to be offered. Apparently, for Rare skills the needed level for an upgrade to be offered is between a whopping 40 and 60.

I carry out a few more tests, even going as far as to change two of my fingers into an approximation of mandibles and try to snap apart the vines on my wall. Shaking my head at how easy it is, I loosen the smaller vines and have a far more difficult time cutting through them. I nod at the finished product and head back to Cobalt.

When I find her, she’s sitting on a stump of a tree, regaling the few mushroom guardians that always follow her with a tale of her triumphs. In this particular one, she literally punched the brains out of a monster. To my horror, I see several mushroom guardians stare at their fists in puzzlement during her story, wondering how to accomplish such a feat on their own.

Cobalt spots me at the fringes of the everpresent mist that swirls around her and moves over to me, “Mandrake Green, has something gone wrong?” she asks eagerly. Sitting around, waiting for monsters, isn’t something she likes and I know she has been itching for some proper monster to fight or at least practice her skills on.

I shake my head, “Nothing has changed.” Her shoulders sag in disappointment, “I think I’m done testing and can replace that shoddy palisade with proper battlements to stand on.”

She claps her hands in joy, “Excellent! I have always carried a deep fondness for proper fortifications. it has saved many lives on my Homeworld.”

I tell her about the changes I made to the walls and end up discussing some things with her. In the end, she and all the mushroom guardians under her command will stand atop the walls. It would only be wise to follow her wishes.

Arriving at the twenty metres of bindweed wall, she and the mushroom guardians make short work of tearing my first attempt out of the ground. She specifies how broad the walkway should be and accordingly, I scale up the model, with a wince on my face. While it might be far stronger and denser than anything else I’ve built from bindweed, the cost scales accordingly. Where my full stamina pool served to create several metres of wall on my first attempt, all that Stamina might now serve to create only a single metre of battlements.

I convey my concerns to her and she rolls her shoulders in annoyance, “Mandrake Green, I am telling you this, so that you can avoid the mistakes I made in my past. Cutting corners on this will always result in death. Stamina is free and will regenerate with time. Lives do not.” I open my mouth but when she folds her arms over each other, her compound eyes glinting dangerously, I surrender and nod.

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My hands push into the upturned ground and the long arduous process of constructing the battlements begins. My resources drain like water being poured through a sieve. My body stiffens at the sudden lack of all that energy and I break out in a clammy sweat as I pour more into building the wall.

A few minutes later I’m out of Stamina, staggering backwards as the world wobbles around me. My calculations were horribly off. Almost 200 resource points only amounted to half a metre of wall.

I sag to the ground and take in deep gulps of air while the leaves on my crown fold open to catch sunlight. Cobalt stands guard with her posse while I build the wall bit by bit over the next hour. After another round, I’m back to lying on the grass devoid of Resources. My eyes rove over the blue sky, settling on strange brown plumes that sprout from the ground, growing upwards.

“What’s that?” I ask sitting up and staring at the oddities. More and more seem the be rising from the ground and for a second I think that the Zulissian armies decided to take a detour and wipe this part of the forest off the map. But the colour makes my suspicion turn towards the Cave crawlers.

“They breached the surface,” Cobalt comments, despair dripping off the words.

“Sairal is out…” I trail off, imagining the pockets of insects we saw in the depths, pooling over the ground and flooding the outskirts.

Cobalt shakes the surprise away and starts firing commands one after another. Mushroom guardians effortlessly climb on top of the walls, fist brandished like weapons to slaughter the soon incoming horde. From the moss carpet around Sairal’s tree, hundreds of mushroom guardians rise and jog to the walls. The increasing drain on mana should be enough to tell Sairal that something is going awry if he hasn't noticed.

Cobalt turns back to me, “You need to finish this wall immediately. When they reach us, we won’t have the power to keep them off the walls, let alone protect this gap.”

Upon her command I push my hands back into the ground and conjure bindweed vines, covering the six or so metres that remain up with poorly constructed wall. If I have the chance and the time, I can reshape the wall later, though that will cost much more Resources.

With the spare points of Stamina, I shape my hands back into claws and prepare for combat.

Somehow, the insects don’t barge past the treeline, nor besiege us from every side. But as more entrances to the depths are dug and the air grows thick with dust, my heart sinks further in my chest.

I climb into Sairal’s tree, getting a better vantage point and see the forest diminish before my eyes. Bald spots grow as trees are felled in rapid succession; every scrap of Greenery taken back into the depths, leaving nothing but upturned dirt that gets compressed by thousands of insectile feet minutes later behind. They are out in full force, doing their best to sweep the region clean with a single move.

I head back to Cobalt who has positioned herself on the wall, angrily staring at the closest plumes of dust. Her posture is crouched as if she’s thinking of leaping off the walls and meeting them head-on.

“How is it?” she demands, not taking her eyes off the tree line.

“Bad. Really bad. At their pace, the closest camps will find us in a matter of hours.” I say.

She jumps off the wall and presses her body close to the ground, trying to feel the tremors the Cave crawlers might make. “Continue working on the battlements. Keep half of your Stamina in reserve, Mandrake Green.”

I follow her commands and head back to the wall, going through another few cycles of using Bindweed Conjuration and Bindweed Manipulation, recovering when my Stamina hits 50% or lower.

Stretching out my leaves for the umpteenth time while looking at the brown plumes of dust that continue to spread from the centre of the forest, I hear something pleasant I’ve been waiting ages for.

*Photosynthesis (C) lvl 19/20 -> Photosynthesis (C) lvl 20/20.

*Congratulations. Thanks to your feats Photosynthesis (C) has become eligible for an upgrade. Pick one of four options

*Option 1: Solar storage

*Option 2: Light Capture

*Option 3: Movement

*Option 4: Skip the upgrade

I sit down with my back against the bindweed wall while I ponder over the options. My crown of leaves is my biggest weak point. When they get damaged, I receive a percentage-based reduction to my resource pools and stats, so, I need to be a bit careful with which one I’ll choose.

Movement sounds like a lot of fun, and might eventually become a body enhancement skill, essentially allowing me to photosynthesise while fighting, but having my crown unfolded in a fight is a big no.

Light Capture, to be frank, isn’t that great. Shadows and normal light don’t hold much energy so I would basically be pursuing crumbs.

Solar Storage on the other hand? It would be taking a step away from regenerating more Stamina, the combat potential is high. As the name implies, I can store energy gained from photosynthesis in my body and release it when It’s needed over a short period of time.

The downside is that energy has to go somewhere in some sort of form. Here, it will be stored in sugars and starch cells in my body, making me…denser and a more desirable alchemical element than I already am. I’d be a walking high-protein bar.

I read the skill description again and decide to wait until Sairal returns.

Half an hour later he actually does, his clothes soaked in green gore. Cobalt and I trail behind him as he makes his way to his tree, stripping out of his clothes and wrenching the blood out of them with a scowl. I ask them about my upgrades for Photosynthesis while he changes into something else.

“Pick Solar Storage. Even if it isn’t exactly what you want, you can hammer that out in later upgrades. Besides, with more levels the energy density you’ll be able to pack in will increase along with how much energy you can capture with your leaves,” the dryad comments absentmindedly while scrolling through system menus that only he can see.

Cobalt echoes his opinion and I pick that upgrade for the skill.

*Picked option 1.

*Photosynthesis (C) lvl 20/20 -> Solar Storage (C) lvl 1/20.

*Solar Storage (C) lvl 1/20: Store the energy gained through photosynthesis in the form of sugars and starch, increasing your weight proportionally. Energy density scales with level.

My smile freezes when I notice that the rarity hasn’t changed. I guess the skill might have some glaring weaknesses like the ratio of conversion being really bad.

I turn back to the debate between Cobalt and Sairal that has been going on. “...we won’t be able to hold them off the walls if we have to face entire nests,” Cobalt argues, “Furthermore, knowing the insects, they will try to dig under the walls. How will we manage that, Dryad Sairal?”

He pulls his bow and several daggers out of his pocket space, all stained with green blood. Pulling out a cloth, he cleans them as he ponders over the problems.

“I can create a network of vines that’ll hold them off under my part of the wall,” I say weakly, already knowing it won’t solve anything.

Cobalt shakes her head, “It will only delay the inevitable.”

“Yes, we need to take some more…extreme measures,” Sairal says scowling as he looks at the space to the left of his face.

“What do you have in mind?” I ask.

His scowl worsens as he reads something off a system menu, “...discarding a skill.”

I fold my arms over each other, “You said-”

“I did,” he says, his tone devoid of emotion, “Green, Cobalt, you two get to see what happens when you discard a skill.”